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Comment by amenhotep | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a natural consequence of having "millions of pages", if you think about it? You might have a lot of users, but they're only looking at what they want to look at. The crawlers are hitting every single link, revisiting all the links they've seen before, their traffic scales differently.

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I think you’re right. At first I thought “crawlers are actually creating large amounts of spam requests” but this is just the way a searchable web functions. The crawlers are just building the index of the internet.

Maybe Google needs to implement an API where you can notify it when a page on your site has changed. That should cut down on redundant crawls a lot, eh?

We very much wanted this! We had people that were ex-Google and ex-Bing who reached out to former colleagues, but nothing came of it. You'd think it would be in their interest, too.

The best explanation I can come up with is that a failure to notify them of a change makes them look bad when their search results are out of date. Especially if the failures are malicious, fitting in with the general theme of the article.

In 2021 Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, and (later, in 2023) Naver ended up implementing a standard where you can notify one search engine of a page update and the other participating search engines are also notified [1, 2, 3].

[1]: https://www.indexnow.org/

[2]: https://www.bing.com/indexnow

[3]: https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2021/IndexNow-Insta...

>The best explanation I can come up with is that a failure to notify them of a change makes them look bad when their search results are out of date. Especially if the failures are malicious, fitting in with the general theme of the article.

Should be easy to crosscheck the reliability of update notifications by doing a little bit of polling too.

Or you could just delete it, if your content isn't valuable enough that you'll pay to have it served once a week without ad-dollars to subsidize it.

https://developers.google.com/search/apis/indexing-api/v3/us...

You can have millions of static pages and serve them very inexpensively. Showing dynamic ads is fundamentally exposing an expensive computational resource without any rate limiting. If that was any other API or service it would be gated but the assumption here is that this particular service will make more money than lose and it obviously breaks down in this instance. I really don’t think you can say it’s about scale when what you’re scaling (serving ads to bots) doesn’t make any business sense.

Leaving the ads in was a business necessity because it eliminated the documented risk of being delisted by Google for customizing content for their crawlers. The company would have gone out of business if that happened permanently. Even if it only happened for a few days, it would have meant millions in lost revenue.

seems like it'd make more sense to just send your html to dedicated ports.

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